Remember the 2008 election campaign? The financial markets were going crazy, and banks that were "too big to fail" were bailed out by the government. Smug EU officials proclaimed that all was well within the EU—even while they were bailing out a number of financial institutions. Fast forward to 2012, and the EU is looking at hard times. Greece can't pay its debt. Italy can, but the markets don't trust it to be able to. Spain and Portugal are teetering around like toddlers just waiting for the market to give them one good push. Members of the public are behaving like teenagers, screaming "F**k you," while flipping the bird. The markets are reacting like drunk parents, and the resulting bruises are going to take a while to heal.

In all of this, uninformed idiots blame the Greeks for being lazy, the Germans for being too strict, and everyone but themselves. Newspapers, blogs, and television are filled with wise commentary hailing the return of the gold standard, the breakup of the Euro, or any number of sensible and not-so-sensible ideas. How are we to parse all this information? Do any of these people know what they are talking about? And if anyone does, how can we know which ones to listen to? The research of Dunning and Kruger may well tell us there is no way to figure out the answers to any of these questions. That is kind of scary.

It has been more than 10 years since Dunning and Kruger published their work. I suspect it has become required reading in psychology courses. It's also a paper that has important implications for learning and communication, so what has happened since? Have the results held up? Are they universal? And what can we do to avoid falling victim to our own inabilities?

"The paper gave voice to an observation that people make about their peers, but that they don’t know how to express," Dunning said.

This paper has become a cult classic. It is well-written—humor interspersed with robust data, and conclusions that are discussed in a thorough and accessible way. I wondered if Dunning knew that this paper would become such a classic, and when I spoke with him he responded quite to the contrary. "I frankly thought the paper would never be published," Dunning said. "It really doesn’t fit the usual structure of a modern-day research psychology finding. A wise editor who got it and good reviewers showed me wrong there. I am struck just with how long and how much this idea has gone viral in so many areas."

Clearly, the paper struck a chord with many people outside of the field of psychology. "I presume the paper gave voice to an observation that people make about their peers but that they don’t know how to express," Dunning responded. If you have not read the paper already, I recommend doing so.

Unfortunately, in those places ruled by the smug and complacent, a classic paper has become a weapon. The findings of Dunning and Kruger are being reduced to "Stupid people are so stupid that they don't know they are stupid." Rather bluntly, Dunning himself said, "The presence of the Dunning-Kruger effect, as it’s been come to be called, is that one should pause to worry about one’s own certainty, not the certainty of others." And that humorously suggests the Dunning-Kruger effect is now a candidate to become a second Godwin's law.

Like Dunning, I do not take such a dim view of humanity. In fact, Dunning-Kruger and follow-up papers give us cause for hope. They show that people are not usually irredeemably stupid. You can teach people to accurately self-evaluate—though, in their specific examples, this also involved teaching them the very skill they were trying to evaluate.

Context is everything

It is important to realize that the Dunning-Kruger paper was not such a shocking finding. It was, for instance, already known that seemingly everyone evaluates themselves as above average in everything. Are you a better driver than average? Certainly am. How do you rate your ability at math? Oh, a little better than average. How about mountain climbing? Well, I've climbed the local hill a couple of times. I bet Kilimanjaro can't be much more difficult.

A large pile of research on various groups of people, covering various skill sets, indicates that in the face of all evidence, humans are irredeemably optimistic about their own abilities. That is, by itself, not such a bad thing. The ugly side shows up when we also realize that the norm must be maintained. Studies show that we do this by considering that everyone else is much worse. Being clueless about your own abilities is one thing. Misjudging other's abilities is relatively more serious.

People who evaluate the performance of their underlings are likely to be incapable of such an evaluation

A truer sentence has never been written about today's corporate work environment. Invariably you'll be hired by someone unqualified to judge your ability to do a job (they'll go by whether you have the right pieces of paper listed on the piece of paper you hand them) you'll be managed by someone unqualified to determine if you're actually competent (your competence will be determined by how they feel about you personally) and you'll likely eventually be fired by someone who has no idea how to actually run the business they're in charge of. Bankers make terrible leaders, but that's basically what the western world has ended up with: ultra-wealthy bean-counters determining the direction of the western industrial world.

Heh. I noticed by how slow it loaded, it must have been a high-rez photo.

Great story!Reminds me of a saying where the more we learn, the more we realize how little we know. And, this fact should make us humble as we learn more. But, it doesn't work in every case, as some become haughty. But, it does explain why incompetent individuals are usually smug in their "knowledge."

Well Chris don't worry to much about your dutch! i myself am from the Netherlands and have never liked the language. also ever since i got better at English i started to prefer it over my own mothers tongue.

And i can relate very much to the fact you have lots of problems speaking the dutch language! since i have moved to Brazil, and am required to speak Portuguese. Although i have been told by many that my language skills for a foreigner are quite good. i still find my self horrible at it.

On a side note, i must say this article reminds me a bit of the book "the hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams.

I don't think the example you used about being able to drive in snow/ice is a good one because the necessity of the skill is very location dependent. If you live in Florida or Alabama cowering at home until everything melts is not an unreasonable decision. If you live in Alaska or Michigan knowing how to drive in winter weather should be a mandatory requirement to get a drivers license.

I think this whole subject matter can be most easily handled by the idea that I hope we have all had at one point in our lives. As you work to learn a subject, the more you immerse yourself, the more you realize how much you do not know. Before you invariably thought it would be complicated, but not THAT complicated. As you learn it however, you start realizing more and more facets that you had never considered.

Take for example the game of Poker (of any style). I played for years at pickup games with friends, with no serious ideas about how to play or the psychology of the game until I picked up a book on Texas Hold'em and it opened my eyes as to how Poker can legitimately be a skill game. How statistics and the law of averages can hold sway over the game. But then as you master that aspect (accurately calculating pot odds etc) you start realizing that by application of game theory, you can start determining what other operators are doing (IE read your opponents and their cards) and why and then start identifying opportunities to exploit previously unavailable probabilities (If you know they have crap, you can bluff them into folding early to avoid lucky cards late in the hand, if you know they have a good hand that isn't as good as yours, you can sucker them into big bets for big losses). As you become more adept at one level of the game, you start seeing hints at the other levels.

Fortunately Poker experts are pretty easy to identify by looking at repeated winners of WSOP events and so you can read their books and get a leg up. But before that, you don't even see Poker for the skill game it is. You only see it as a gambling game of chance you and your friends have fun with over beer on a weekend. It isn't until you learn a little that you learn how much you don't know, and how far from an expert you are. (And as you get better, how much even being a little better at one skill or another can affect your final outcome).

The idea that stupid people are so stupid that they don't know they are stupid has been around for ages. It hardly merits becoming another interweb "law". I think Godwin's Law is also idiotic, since Hitler makes a great common reference point for analogical filtering.

It is vital to point out that there is a huge difference between being unaware of one's own incompetence, and moving forward with decisions in the absence of complete information (which rarely, if ever exists). In particular, the examples cited with respect to the European economy are largely unfair, particularly since economists themselves disagree on almost every single point. More importantly, every voter, every citizen, must make decisions about a myriad of issues, where it would be impossible to be deeply informed about all of them. Good decision makers take into consideration the time constraints and the marginal cost of obtaining further details, and move forward, very often to the chagrin of specialists.

Actually the European economy is a perfect example of a bunch of ignorant actors acting in what they think is their best interests and often working diametrically against those same interests. And the further difficulty in identifying what the correct direction is because it is so hard to tell the experts from the ignorant.

In general the voting public is idiotic when it comes to money (as can be identified by their personal financial habits). I make no claim to nation state scale expertise in economics, I am simply stating that I can identify a financial idiot by how they spend and manage their own money.

One basic reality is that societies of human beings have to organize themselves with little real idea of what they are doing. Another basic reality is there is little value in spending time and energy thinking much about something you don't understand. So human beings are prone to fill in the many gaps in our understanding with whatever comes to hand. Those who think that Nobel prize winning scientists live in a different world are just examples of this reality.Another basic reality is that life is a process that is far from equilibrium. Human life is particularly far from any kind of equilibrium and the present period of human life is exceptional even for human history in the explosive nature of its changing trajectory. The astonishing idea widely believed among our policy makers and pundits is that human society has some kind of intrinsic potential to grow our economies forever at some steady rate that only needs a little magic from the Federal Reserve to maintain equilibrium. Somehow people are able to maintain this idea even in the face of a recent history where everyone knows the performance/cost ratio of computing equipment has been increasing at a rate of 10 to 100 per decade over the last four or five decades. People babble on about what history shows and manage to ignore the reality that human history has shown that human societies never have much idea of what their future holds and rarely manage to maintain some kind of stable pattern of cooperative behavior for more than a few decades.

Actually the European economy is a perfect example of a bunch of ignorant actors acting in what they think is their best interests and often working diametrically against those same interests. And the further difficulty in identifying what the correct direction is because it is so hard to tell the experts from the ignorant.

In general the voting public is idiotic when it comes to money (as can be identified by their personal financial habits). I make no claim to nation state scale expertise in economics, I am simply stating that I can identify a financial idiot by how they spend and manage their own money.

Separate the experts from the ignorant and you still have widely diverging opinions about the financial crisis. The poor incompetent voter, he must listen to these opinions and make a decision. Such is life.

The idea that stupid people are so stupid that they don't know they are stupid has been around for ages. It hardly merits becoming another interweb "law".

I think you, and many other commentors, missed the point made, where Dunning implies that the law shouldn't be "Stupid people are so stupid they don't know they are stupid", but rather "YOU are so stupid you don't know you are stupid".

And yes, that was a little hyperbole. More accurately, it should be "You CAN BE so stupid you don't know you are stupid, but THERE IS A CURE."

"You can teach people to accurately self-evaluate—though, in their specific examples, this also involved teaching them the very skill they were trying to evaluate."

In the age of anti-intellectualism, where the last president of the most powerful nation in the world cannot even pronounce the name of the deadliest weapons in his control (nucular), and people flock to watch the Kardashians on TV, do we really expect people to be open to learning?

Greece can't pay its debt. Italy can, but the markets don't trust it to be able to. Spain and Portugal are teetering around like toddlers just waiting for the market to give them one good push. Members of the public are behaving like teenagers, screaming "F**k you," while flipping the bird. The markets are reacting like drunk parents, and the resulting bruises are going to take a while to heal.

I think this is the best description I've read yet of what's going wrong in the markets right now. Well done!

you both have a good point. to relate to your points, most of the problem Europe is facing now is because, they tried to equal the financial strengths of the each country within the Union. Which will work during an economic upturn but during a downturn. That is the time when such a collaboration will show its weaknesses and its strengths. And for which it was build.

Now this downturn we can point to something that relates very much to this article, and i don't even need to say he's name. (you can see them growing in parks alot)

However, for Greece to step out now is just stupid. Their economy is so dependent on Europe, they will spin in to an even deeper "well" then they are in already. Not to mention that they are in this "well" because they wanted to enter into the European Union.

For Spain, Portugal and Italy you can point your finger very easily to the housing market and those can be traced back to the economic uptime, and collapsed. which caused the markets to come back to their original/realistic numbers.

The idea that stupid people are so stupid that they don't know they are stupid has been around for ages. It hardly merits becoming another interweb "law". I think Godwin's Law is also idiotic, since Hitler makes a great common reference point for analogical filtering.

You know who else thought Hitler was a great way to filter out undesirable things? ;)

The idea that stupid people are so stupid that they don't know they are stupid has been around for ages. It hardly merits becoming another interweb "law".

I think you, and many other commentors, missed the point made, where Dunning implies that the law shouldn't be "Stupid people are so stupid they don't know they are stupid", but rather "YOU are so stupid you don't know you are stupid".

And yes, that was a little hyperbole. More accurately, it should be "You CAN BE so stupid you don't know you are stupid, but THERE IS A CURE."

I will file your comment on under "you are stupid but there is a cure", alongside the authors' assertion, "we are too stupid to know our assertion is stupid".

The idea that stupid people are so stupid that they don't know they are stupid has been around for ages. It hardly merits becoming another interweb "law". I think Godwin's Law is also idiotic, since Hitler makes a great common reference point for analogical filtering.

You know who else thought Hitler was a great way to filter out undesirable things? ;)

"You can teach people to accurately self-evaluate—though, in their specific examples, this also involved teaching them the very skill they were trying to evaluate."

In the age of anti-intellectualism, where the last president of the most powerful nation in the world cannot even pronounce the name of the deadliest weapons in his control (nucular), and people flock to watch the Kardashians on TV, do we really expect people to be open to learning?

They "already know".

The proper way to pronounce a word is the way everyone around your pronounces it.

Actually the European economy is a perfect example of a bunch of ignorant actors acting in what they think is their best interests and often working diametrically against those same interests.

Would you care to explain that?

Just to take the case of individual actors such as the Greek citizens. They are protesting like crazy that they shouldn't lose any of their somewhat ridiculously generous benefits. However their country is insolvent. How do they expect to have their benefits paid out if the country literally has no money and cannot borrow any more? Isn't it better to take decreased but still existent benefits over no benefits whatsoever because their government cannot borrow more money?

I think this mostly comes down to one's ability to think critically. If one is a critical thinker and is confronted with a completely unfamiliar situation the first thing they want is more info. A non thinker may simply make the decision and then make their own "facts" to back it up. It may also not matter if you drag these people across the rug for being incompetent, as if they are not able to/willing to think they may have a substitute. They can use a belief/faith system to convert wants and wishes into "facts". I believe Ars had an article about how when these people are confronted with real facts they do not change their mind, they actually believe more strongly in what was wrong to begin with. This is the closes I can find. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =128490874 . So if you confront them on their incompetence they may just believe even more strongly that they are competent.As flash pointed out about the Downing effect this may be directly related to intelligence. It may simply come down to dumb people believe they are smart/good at things because they do not think. Ego is also most likely a contributor. This system of being just plain wrong I think can be extended across just about all human endeavors. Ugly people who think they are hot. Evil people who think they are good. Self centered people who think they are generous. People with horrible thing X which they think is amazing. Another thing that the thinkers will do that the believers will avoid is trying to scale the situation. Validated Metrics are the enemy of the incompetent/stupid. Moron: "I R smart, so you are worng!" You: "Well how about you take this bank of IQ tests?"Moron: "IQ tests are meaningless!"You: "well, actually while a single IQ test may not give an accurate picture of intelligence, a whole bank of normed tests can give you an idea. So while you may not be able to say 'My IQ is 195!' you can come up with a scale "my IQ is ~145-165.'".Moron: "Nuh uh!"you: :faceplam:

And then there are the perfectionists: "I can bench 325 3x and I weigh 240, Joel can do 450 and he weighs 135. I'm bad at bench ". Those who set potentially unattainable standards may rate their own ability inaccurately. The other issue is that when they put the standard that high it is often for them the acceptable level and not "great". There are also cases where an acceptable standard becomes unacceptable when a new one is found; 325 bench might have been OK, had you not watched Joel bench.

Actually the European economy is a perfect example of a bunch of ignorant actors acting in what they think is their best interests and often working diametrically against those same interests. And the further difficulty in identifying what the correct direction is because it is so hard to tell the experts from the ignorant.

In general the voting public is idiotic when it comes to money (as can be identified by their personal financial habits). I make no claim to nation state scale expertise in economics, I am simply stating that I can identify a financial idiot by how they spend and manage their own money.

I found the comment on the economy interesting as well. I don't know if praising the economy before it crashed had to do with ignorance or hidden motives (avoid the panic, massive sell-off of equities and so on)...

Chris Lee / Chris writes for Ars Technica's science section. A physicist by day and science writer by night, he specializes in quantum physics and optics. He lives and works in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.